Who Decided That This Election Should Be About Sex?

In The Conversation, David Brooks and Gail Collins talk between columns every Wednesday.

Gail Collins: David, if you had asked me what the big topic of the presidential race was going to be, I’d certainly have said jobs, jobs, jobs. But lately, we seem to be talking about women, women, women.

David Brooks: With an opening like that I’m suddenly having flashbacks to the Clinton years.

Gail: In Washington they’re fighting about whether it’s a good plan to have all-male panels discussing women’s right to get contraceptives under their health insurance. In Virginia they’re debating abortion and Mississippi is thinking about bringing back the personhood amendment its voters defeated last year. In Indiana this week there was a dust-up in the State Legislature over the Girl Scouts, and whether they promote abortion and homosexuality.

And of course, the Republican presidential campaign is all over it. You’ll have to explain to me whether you think Rick Santorum believes that talking about the evils of prenatal testing is good for his campaign or whether he just can’t help himself.

David: Oh, that kind of women’s issue. Less Paula Jones, more Bob Jones. I guess my reaction to all these issues is that they are getting more and more fringey. For a few decades we had knockdown, drag-out fights about how the sexual revolution was going to shake out, but now it’s sort of a done deal.

We’ve reached a national consensus. People in the educated class talk like social progressives and behave like traditionalists. People in the less educated classes talk like social conservatives and behave like libertines. Nearly everybody is cool with things like contraception. Most people want to restrict abortion without making it impossible and we’re kind of exhausted by the fight that never goes anywhere.

To me the thing that took the stuffing out of the culture wars is that the social fabric began to repair. Teenage pregnancy rates are down. Abortion rates are down. Crime is down. There are problems with the social fabric but they no longer have to do with the sexual revolution.

When Rick Santorum talks about this stuff in the way he does, it’s theology, not sociology. And believe me, there are very few Americans who are strongly theological, even the ones who attend services every week.

Gail: I’m being driven crazy by people who are obsessed with limiting the scope of government, but feel perfectly free to demand that government get involved in women’s most personal choices. How can they argue that the states have no right to meddle in education, then cheer for the states to pass laws telling a doctor to perform a stupendously invasive procedure like a pelvic ultrasound on an unwilling patient who wants to get a first trimester abortion?

Okay, I’m done. Calming down and moving forward.

David: Moving forward? Please don’t tell me you got a contract with MSNBC. Isn’t that their slogan? Or is it Lean Forward? Why would MSNBC be content with leaning? Shouldn’t they be marching forward? Leaning sounds so inebriated.

(Don’t mind me, I’m just trying to change the subject from Santorum’s position on prenatal testing.)

Gail: Whenever you bring up women’s internal workings, guys want to change the subject. Unless, of course, they’re trying to change the laws.

David: As to your larger point, I do think it’s consistent to be economically libertarian and socially paternalistic. In fact I’d argue dynamic capitalism requires a stringent and coherent social order to help guard against its savageries — tight families to educate children, anti-materialist values to police rampant consumerism, a spiritual public square to mitigate the corrosive culture of greedy self-interest.

Free market beliefs and socially conservative beliefs require each other, so long as those socially conservative beliefs are traditional, not theological. I’m for traditional values, with government playing a small role to support them. I get worried when some politician begins trying to legislate his faith’s version of Natural Law.

Gail: I’m not sure whether this obsessing about sex works for Santorum, but I suspect that it’s really bad for the anti-abortion movement. Its leaders have been very canny in trying to present the debate as a fight over whether a doctor can dismember a fully developed fetus. And they were doing pretty well, politically.

Now the debate is about things like contraception, fertilization treatments and prenatal testing. A vast majority of Americans don’t regard any of these things as immoral. And the fact that we’re arguing about them highlights the critical fact that convictions about precisely exactly when a new life begins – fertilization? implantation? quickening? birth? — are both deeply personal and deeply theological.

David: I guess that’s true but the anti-abortion movement seems pretty healthy. The way I read the polls young people are moving way left on same-sex marriage and slightly right on abortion. Of course most people like me are in the squishy middle.

Gail: But I know the woman-related news that most interests you is the new government data on the rise of unwed mothers. It seems likely that pretty soon most American children will be born to unmarried women. The big argument seems to be whether this is a result of the lack of good-paying blue collar jobs or a split in our society, in which the bottom third – or half or two-thirds – lead lives that are too chaotic for long-term relationships.

David: I’ve tried to argue that it’s both. It’s a spiral of economic and social influences that are impossible to untangle. As one social scientist put it, what nature hath joined together, multiple regression cannot put asunder.

Gail: There’s a really good book on this subject called “Promises I Can Keep,” by Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas. They concluded that low-income women saw marriage not as the beginning of their lives, but as the payoff. They intended to wait until they had put together enough resources to have a nice wedding, and then live in a good place of their own. They were also, of course, waiting to find a man who was settled and stable enough to be a good husband.

In some ways they weren’t different from college-educated women, who tended to put off marriage until they’d gotten their careers off the ground. The difference was that the poorer women regarded marriage as a reward, but children as a necessity. They weren’t prepared to defer motherhood the way their better educated peers were.

David: I’m so glad you mentioned that book. I’ve been hoping to plug it in a column. It is indeed really good. I do think that the life script that many low-income women envision is simply not correct, though. As you say, they see marriage as a culmination. They have kids, get a good job and make some money, and then they can afford the lovely wedding. That’s backward. For most people getting married is not the payoff after an upward climb it’s the tool to advance the upward climb.

Married people save money. Married people have more settled habits. Married men are much more stable. When people marry first they are more likely to make it later.

Gail: That presumes you can find a settled guy with a good job to marry. I doubt many single mothers have rejected a whole bunch of those prospects.

David: Agreed — this doesn’t solve the other problem, which is what do we do to make it so that more men are worth marrying. But I do think Barack Obama should start a public information campaign that says that people should marry before they have kids, not after. This is one thing Rick Santorum gets right. People who marry before childbearing, graduate from high school and get a job, any job, do not live in poverty. That’s what we need to encourage.

Gail: You may be right that the big issue for America now is class, not race or gender. But in this presidential campaign, gender rules. Really, sex rules. Who’d have thought?

David: Class is gender. Specifically men. The wage stagnation and inequality stories are largely stories about how badly men have been doing over the past few decades. Women’s incomes have been up, up, up.

So let’s return to our normal subject. Men, men, men. Let’s go back and have a normal election: men talking about themselves. The love that won’t shut up.